


Two

by IneffableFangirl_writes



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-28 04:59:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17176355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IneffableFangirl_writes/pseuds/IneffableFangirl_writes
Summary: About 6 years after the "Death Takes a Holiday" series by LyraNgalia and rude_not_ginger.Nero and Livia Adler-Holmes are dropped off with their father while their mother pops out to do something important. Nero and Livia are the collective brainchildren of LyraNgalia, rude_not_ginger, and myself.





	Two

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LyraNgalia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyraNgalia/gifts), [rude_not_ginger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rude_not_ginger/gifts).



On the rug in the center of 221B Baker Street, two small dark-haired children sat on a rug bent over a jigsaw puzzle. Outside, the rain fell on a black umbrella and on upturned collar of a dark wool overcoat. After a moment, the door swung open and Sherlock Holmes blew into the room, dropping his coat mostly onto the coat tree by the door. He yanked off his scarf and shook the remaining rain from it before toeing off his shoes and dropping into the armchair on one side of the parlor.  
“Erm, Sherlock?”  
“Busy, John.”  
“Your children are on the floor.”  
“Mmm.”  
“Sherlock,” John said sharply, and Sherlock looked up, exasperated.  
“What, John?”  
Both heads raised to look at the doctor and the detective and Sherlock appeared to notice the children on the floor. He pressed his brows together and studied the small children on the floor.  
“The Woman dropped you off?”  
They nodded.  
“I suppose she had something important to do that you couldn’t go along for?”  
Another nod.  
“And that other woman, the dowdy one,”  
“Sherlock!” Mrs. Hudson came in bearing a tea tray. “Who are you calling dowdy?”  
“Their mother’s friend, the one who looks after them.”  
“Penelope,” Mrs. Hudson supplied.  
“Whatever. I’m in the middle of a case right now.”  
“Sherlock,” John butted back in, “It’s the twin brother. He has a motive, he has the same DNA, and there were no prints because he wore gloves.”  
Three voices, two small and high-pitched, one deep and bored-sounding chorused back.  
“It’s never the twin.”  
“They talk?” John said, shocked.  
“Of course they talk, they’re five.”  
“Six,” chorused the children.  
“So what, they’ve just been pretending they couldn’t talk for the past six years?”  
“Five,” the twins said together.   
“Nero, Livia, I’ve brought chocolate biscuits!”  
The twins scrambled to their feet and into the kitchen towards Mrs. Hudson and the tea tray.  
“Sherlock, I’ve moved the plate of...I think it’s skin?...into the refrigerator.”  
“It needs to be kept at room temperature.”  
“On top of the fridge then.”  
“Fine.”  
John set his umbrella against the wall and rubbed at his eyes.   
“So many questions. About the skin, about the children, about...God just so many questions.”  
Nero and Livia sat at the wooden kitchen chairs, their feet dangling above the dirty tile. As they munched on chocolate biscuits, they whispered back and forth in a made-up language, occasionally giggling together.  
“Adorable,” Mrs. Hudson said affectionately. “I’ll be back to check in around supper, I know your father forgets to eat.”  
“How long are they staying?” John asked.  
“Until The Woman picks them up, I suppose.”  
“So you don’t know.”  
“Unimportant,” Sherlock said, waving his hand dismissively. “We’ve got a case.”  
The Adler-Holmes twins, Nero and Livia, sat up straighter.  
“There’s a case?”  
“Can we help?”  
“Don’t get chocolate on any evidence.”  
“Sherlock! They’re children!”  
“My children. I can assess some developmental marks as we work it.”  
“You can’t seriously tell me that you’re going to allow children to help work a murder investigation?”  
“I’m sure that their mother has brought them to worse.”  
“Mum hasn’t brought us anywhere fun in ages,” Nero whined. “Please let us help, Uncle John.”  
His sister smiled at him and said something in their made-up language.   
“This is...I’m not handling this. Sherlock, I need to go to the clinic. Do not take those children to an active crime scene.”  
Sherlock snorted,  
“Of course not, John. I’m not an idiot.”  
The doctor left the detective and his children alone with Mrs. Hudson bustling about for another few minutes. Once she’d tidied a little, she also left. Sherlock continued staring into space, processing all the data he’d gathered at the crime scene. He didn’t look at his children when he addressed them.  
“You’ve decided to talk to John now?”   
“It was getting inconvenient,” Livia said solemnly. “Even if we only see Dr. Watson a few times a year, he can only believe that we were nonverbal for so long.”  
“We needed to communicate more than we needed to stop him from butting into our business. And we’ve got our language for secret things.”  
“Of course. I need an hour to process and then we’ll go to the morgue.”  
“Hurray!” two little voices cheered. Nero pushed a chair up to the counter so he could reach the kitchen sink and he and his sister washed the chocolate and crumbs off their fingers. They settled back onto the floor to complete their jigsaw puzzle, still muttering in their made-up language. In the span of that hour, Sherlock only acknowledged them once.  
“You never did tell me why that other woman couldn’t look after you.”  
“No,” agreed Nero. “We didn’t.”  
He nodded and went back to his mind palace.

 

“They’re wearing coats, aren’t they?” Mrs. Hudson asked as Sherlock, Nero, and Livia all came down the stairs towards the front door.  
Sherlock looked at his wool coat and scarf, then at the two six-year-olds, still in their cardigans and trousers.   
“They’re wearing shoes.”  
“Sherlock Holmes,” Mrs. Hudson scolded, pointing back up the stairs. “If you’re wearing a coat, so are they. They’ll catch their deaths out there.”  
“Actually,” Nero and his father said simultaneously, and looked at each other, surprised. Livia rolled her eyes and clomped back up the stairs, returning a moment later with her coat and her brother’s.   
“You know we won’t get sick from being cold,” Nero muttered as he pulled on his mittens.  
“This is what Mother meant by picking your battles,” Livia retorted.   
Once they were appropriately dressed for the rain and chill, Mrs. Hudson stepped back into her flat, calling after them,  
“You knock on my door when you come back. It won’t do for them to miss supper.”  
“Nutrition is important at our age,” Livia agreed. She and her brother held hands and followed behind Sherlock, twin shadows for London’s greatest consulting detective. The sidewalk crowds were thin; between the cold and the rain, no one wanted to be out so it was easy to keep track of the tall, fast-walking man in the wool coat. They had to run every few steps to keep up with his long, easy strides but neither child seemed to particularly mind. He buzzed the bell to the morgue, waiting to be let in. In the great tiled waiting room, it smelled faintly of blood and formaldehyde and the twins pulled themselves into the plastic-coated chairs, staring at the security camera’s blinking red light. Livia whispered something to her brother and they both gave the camera a jaunty little wave.  
“What on earth are you doing?”  
“Waving hello to Uncle Mycroft. Are you going to wave too?”  
Sherlock smirked and glanced at the camera, stared for a long second, then returned his attention to the door.  
“Your uncle doesn’t need me to wave.”  
“We don’t need to,” Nero began, but Molly Hooper pushing the door open cut him off.  
“Sherlock, it’s...hello there.” Her attention shifted to the children. “Who’s this then?”  
“Not now, Molly. I need to see the body.”  
“And I suppose I’m supposed to watch the children for you?”  
“What? Don’t be ridiculous, they’re coming along.”  
“Sherlock!”  
“Well how else will they learn?” He pushed past her into the morgue and the twins followed, leaving Molly to trail behind.  
“Who on earth decided to let you be in charge of children?”  
“Hush, Molly, I’m thinking.”  
“No, Sherlock. You coming in at all hours of the day and night is one thing, but you can’t bring kids with you! I don’t care how you thought they’d be useful!”  
Molly crouched down to be eye-level with the children.  
“Where’s your Mummy and Dad, hmm?”  
They blinked at her, two pairs of blue-grey eyes set into round, pale faces with a few freckles dotting their noses and cheeks. Molly swallowed.  
“Sherlock, are these your children?”  
“You said time of death was approximately fourteen hours ago?”  
“Sherlock!”  
“He’s thinking,” Livia told her. “Who are you?”  
“I’m your dad’s friend Molly. What are your names? Are you cold? It’s a bit nippy down here.”  
“We’re wearing coats,” Nero said.   
“Molly, fourteen hours ago?”  
The medical examiner stood, smiling briefly at the children before answering.  
“Fourteen hours before the body was recovered, so at this point about eighteen hours ago.”  
“And these marks on the arms, are they post or ante-mortem?”  
“Based on the lack of blood, post-mortem.”  
“And you set aside the victim’s effects?”  
“They’ll be sent to the lab in the morning. I’ve had them bagged already.”  
“Fetch them, would you?”  
“And a stool,” Nero added. “We can’t see anything down here.”  
Molly’s face ran through a series of emotions but she turned and left the room only to return a minute later carrying a plastic bin of individually bagged items on one hip and a two-step metal stool in the other.   
“Sherlock, is it allright, them seeing this?”  
“Look at the effects,” he said without looking up. “First one to find useful evidence gets a sweet.”  
One pair of hands tugged the stool from Molly’s grasp and they they pulled open the bin she’d set on a metal table. The sides were too high to reach in and pull things out, so Molly laid them out on the table, reminding them not to touch anything. Her warning was met with such a reproachful look that she almost apologized before remembering that these were children she was speaking to.  
The twins pored over the assorted evidence bags and Molly returned her attention to Sherlock and the body on the table.   
“Cause of death?” he asked.  
Molly pulled on a pair of blue exam gloves and turned the corpse’s head to one side, pulling its hair back.  
“See behind the left ear?”  
“Puncture wound. You swabbed the site?”  
“Being tested now, but based on the nail beds and the gums, it looks like carbon monoxide which is odd since,”  
“You don’t inject it,” Sherlock interrupted. “This is interesting.” He turned his attention to his children for the first time since they’d entered.  
“Well?”  
“He got a load of money in the past month,” Livia said. Not to be outdone, Nero added,  
“He’s ambidextrous and eats a lot of takeaway from the street he lives on.”  
He nodded. “And?”  
The children looked at each other, then at the bags on the table again.   
“Can we look through his phone?”  
“Go on then.”  
“It’s locked,” Molly protested, but Nero was already punching the code in through the plastic bag that held the mobile phone.   
“How--”  
“Greasy fingerprints where the numbers were.”  
Bent together over a dead man’s cell phone, the twins were utterly absorbed and Sherlock had a flash of paternal pride which he immediately quashed.  
“Well?” he repeated.  
“He’s got a girlfriend and a boyfriend.”  
“Boyfriend doesn’t know about the girlfriend, but the girlfriend knows about the boyfriend.”  
“Doesn’t get on with his flatmate.”  
Sherlock walked over, leaning between them.  
“And he won the lottery last month,” he said.  
“What?”   
Sherlock smiled at them.  
“You’ll have to work out how I knew that later. Looking at all the evidence, what do you think happened?”  
“He was killed for his money,” Nero blurted and Livia glared at him.  
“Obviously. We need to know more.”  
“List what you do know.”  
Nero and Livia did, their voices overlapping as they spoke.  
“Man, ambidextrous,”  
“Works in shipping, shares a flat with one other man,”  
“They don’t get on. Has a boyfriend and a girlfriend,”  
“Just won the lottery, puncture mark behind his left ear,”  
“Signs of carbon monoxide poisoning. If you change the numbers of his passcode to letters--”  
“It spells ‘Lori’.”  
Molly didn’t know why she was surprised by the onslaught of information, but she still gaped at them.  
“They are yours,” she murmured.  
“Of course they are. Do you have the blood tests back?”  
“Not yet.”  
“All right, phone me when they come in. I have a few ideas.”  
Molly recovered the body with a sheet as she spoke.  
“Right then, I’ll do--Sherlock?”  
The man and children were gone.


End file.
